Light Warlpiri: not a new mixed language

Today the science news outlets are abuzz with the claim that a newly identified mixed language has been identified in Australia, Light Warlpiri, based on a press release from the Linguistic Society of America, which is reporting a new article by Carmel O’Shannessy entitled “The role of multiple sources in the formation of an innovative auxiliary category in Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language”.   The article in the Examiner is the best of a mixed bunch, but you need to overlook the unfortunate header describing it as the ‘newest language on earth’, which isn’t even remotely true.  But as we’ll see, even the more modest claims in the press release and news articles are misleading.

Warlpiri itself is a Pama-Nyungan language spoken in northern Australia by several thousand people, and is one of the better-known and less threatened (though still endangered) languages of Australia.    Light Warlpiri is spoken by about 300 Warlpiri people in one community, Lajamanu; it mixes English, Kriol, and Warlpiri, with an English verb structure and a Warlpiri and Kriol noun structure, and some elements all its own.   Mixed languages are not creoles (take note) – without going into a long digression, creoles emerge in situations where speakers do not have full access to one of the source languages.  Mixed languages are created in highly bilingual situations –  most speakers of Light Warlpiri also speak Warlpiri, Kriol, or English (in some combination).  Mixed languages can arise (which is what seems to have happened here) when code-switching (which happens in nearly every bilingual speech community) becomes formalized as a set of linguistic patterns.

However, beware!  Light Warlpiri has had a Wikipedia page since 2008 , and Carmel O’Shannessy first identified it in an article ‘Light Warlpiri: A New Language‘, back in 2005 in the Australian Journal of Linguistics, and identified it as a mixed language. According to Google Scholar, it’s been cited 40 times to date.  This is hardly a new discovery.  I get why O’Shannessy is still calling it a ‘new mixed language’ in the article – it’s new-ish, in the sense that it’s only been around for roughly 40 years, and its discovery is new-ish, in that it’s only been known to linguists for fewer than 10 years.  I’m trying not to be pedantic here: it’s not like this has been known for decades, so in some sense it is ‘new’.  But reading the press on this, you’d think that no one had ever heard of Light Warlpiri until today, which is totally false.

O’Shannessy’s new article, which is the one that the LSA press release is touting, is a fuller description of the grammar and history and identifies a new class of auxiliary verbs and some other features in Light Warlpiri that differ in structure from any of the source languages.  This is pretty neat, and is certainly a new discovery.  There may be some broader implications for understanding the development of certain features cross-linguistically, as the press release suggests.  But this is not a new language, nor is it newly discovered, nor newly identified as a mixed language: the article is not making these claims.  In this sense, the LSA press release is quite misleading, and the news articles that are based on it are spreading this misinformation.

Lexiculture redux: new adventures in teaching linguistic anthropology

Just about three years ago, while teaching my undergraduate Language and Culture course, I ended up poking around the etymology of the word honk and turned up some neat things, leading to the germ of an idea for a student project that I ended up calling Lexiculture.    That term, I did a test run with my students, using the word ‘chairperson’ as a really interesting in-class exercise, and then got to work putting it together as a full class assignment in the fall of 2010.   This was considerably advanced about a month later at the Language, Culture, and History conference in Wyoming, organized by Leila Monaghan, and discussions I had with many of the participants there about how to think about the linguistic anthropology of English words: moving beyond lexicography and etymology towards a real integrated approach to language and culture using words.

When I ran this in 2010, I introduced Lexiculture using an in-class exercise where we jointly researched the surprising history of the local term Michigan left.   I then put together a list of projects for them to choose from (or let them choose their own) and set them to work. I was working under a few impediments: I had never done this before, so I was sort of muddling along.  I didn’t give the students quite enough guidance to undertake research projects with good results.  At the time, I couldn’t find a good text to help the students conceptually or methodologically.  So it turned out to be OK, and we got some good results (I especially liked student papers written on the words wife-beater, bitchin’, and ketchup/catsup) but it wasn’t a complete success.    In 2011 I was on sabbatical so I didn’t teach that course, and in 2012 (my last year prior to submitting my tenure file, which is happening now), I decided to focus on some research projects (wisely, I think), and to make the course a bit more traditional.

Well, now it’s 2013, and my tenure file will be set in stone by September, and instead of kicking up my feet and phoning in the last 30 years of my teaching career, I figure it’s time to dust off the notes and put Lexiculture back together.    I’ve had the great fortune to have found a wonderful short, inexpensive text: How to Read a Word by Elizabeth Knowles, which has some good, not-yet-outdated methodological suggestions but more importantly is conceptually critical to get the students thinking about how the history of words intersects with sociocultural change in the English-speaking world.   So using that text, and a revised set of topics, and a stronger methodological introduction to the subject, I’m at it again this fall.

So here are a few of the words / topics on my list for this year:

Information Superhighway: I want to know how this transformed from an index of the speaker’s technological knowhow in the early 1990s, to a sign of outmodedness a decade later.

Stalemate: I want to know by what process this chess term became figuratively adopted for a situation where victory is impossible.

Uppity: What is the metalinguistic discourse surrounding the use of this word in, by, and around African Americans, both in the 19th century and today?

I have a longer list, but I need more, and here’s how you could help.  I’m looking for more English words or phrases  that students could research and that could help illuminate something of social significance.  Some basic requirements:

– The topics need to relate to the last 200-300 years, with a heavy emphasis on post-1900 material. Prior to 1800, the full-text searchable databases / corpora that the students will need are relatively few and inaccessible.
– While the papers will focus on single words or short phrases (i.e. the sort of things that can be researched readily without too much training), I’m not just interested in etymology, but rather, in words or phrases that have cultural significance or whose contextual importance has changed over time.
– The words/phrases could be primarily analyzable quantitatively (using corpora, Google Ngram Viewer, etc.), qualitatively (broader social analysis or close reading of specific textual examples) or both.
– The words/phrases can’t have been over-researched – e.g., tweet and LOL and cool have been researched in such detail that there’s too much risk of plagiarism and not much interest in it for me.

Any ideas for suitable words or phrases would be appreciated in the comments below.  So tell me: do you have a great idea for some lexiculture?

Ward Goodenough (1919-2013), RIP

Ward Goodenough, whose contributions to anthropological linguistics and cognitive anthropology influenced all of us who followed in his footsteps, died a week ago.   You can read his obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer, or see tributes from Rex at Savage Minds and Mark Liberman at Language Log.   I didn’t know Goodenough, although I do know some of his students, so I’ll let others speak about his influence.   New students in the field will probably never hear of him, alas, except perhaps through his now-famous definition of culture as “the things one needs to know in order to meet the standards of others” (1981: 50).     I’d also direct you to his short monograph, Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology (1970), which puts the lie to the notion that comparativists ignored the challenges to comparative methods, or that there was a necessary contradiction between fieldwork and generalization.

Goodenough, Ward Hunt. 1970. Description and comparison in cultural anthropology. Chicago: Aldine.

Goodenough, Ward Hunt. 1981. Culture, language, and society. Menlo Park, Calif: Benjamin/Cummings Pub. Co.

Screws, hammers, and Roman numerals: An allegorical complaint

Let’s imagine that you have a toolbox in your garage, full of all sorts of different useful things, and I’m your annoying neighbor.  One day I drop by while you’re working.  I rummage around, pick up a screwdriver, and say to you, “Gosh, that’s not a very good hammer, is it?”  Naturally, you protest that it isn’t a hammer at all.  Next, I hold the screwdriver by the head instead of the handle and say, “Well, of course, you could use it like this to bang in nails, but it would be very cumbersome.”  You look at me, wondering whether I didn’t hear you properly, and say, “No, really.  It’s not a hammer. I have a hammer, but it’s in the trunk of my car, and that’s not it.”  I turn to you and say, “Well, I’ve never seen your hammer, and it would really be a lot easier if you just used the handle of a screwdriver to bang in nails.  Except that it’s no good for that.”

Now let’s turn from this surreal Pythonesque world to another scenario.

You’re an epigrapher and you find some inscriptions with some Roman numerals.  You look at them and say, “Gosh, those things aren’t very good for math, are they?”  Of course, the writer is dead, so he/she doesn’t say anything.  Next, you fiddle around with the numerals and think to yourself, “Well, look at that!  You could use those for arithmetic if you wanted to, but it would be very cumbersome.”  Again, the writer is not around to protest, although as it turns out, someone else dug up an abacus a few kilometers away.   You think of that, though, and say, “Well, it would really be a lot easier if they had just used numerals to do arithmetic, except that their numerals are no good for that.”

So this is the world I live in, and this is the battle I fight.

The problem is a cognitive and ideological one. We are so attached to the idea that numerals are for arithmetic that it’s very hard to stop and ask whether number symbols were actually used for doing calculations in a given society.  There’s essentially no evidence that Romans or anyone else ever lined up or computed with Roman numerals on papyrus or slate or sand or anything else, while there’s abundant evidence that they used an abacus along with finger-computation.  This should give us pause, but our cognitive bias in favour of the numeral/math functional association overpowers it.    For almost all numerical notation systems used over the past 5000 years, there’s precious little evidence that numerals were manipulated arithmetically.  You might have a multiplication table, or you might write results, but you wouldn’t line up numbers, break long numerals into powers to work with them, or anything of the sort.   And since we don’t know that much about abaci and other arithmetic technologies, even though they were obviously used for arithmetic, we assume (wrongly) that they certainly could never be equally good as written numbers.  And thus we conclude (finally, wrongly, again) that Romans were hopeless at arithmetic.   We might even blame their (purported) lack of mathematical proficiency on their lack of a ‘good’, ‘efficient’ numeral system.

It’s a casual, all-too-easy ethnocentrism, and hard to detect.  It’s not the nativistic, “our ways are good, your ways are bad” ethnocentrism that we mostly know to avoid.     Because arithmetic as it is presently taught almost everywhere relies on the structure of the positional decimal numerals, lined up and manipulated as needed, it takes on a naturalness that is deceptively difficult to untangle.   Yes, the Roman numerals are quite difficult to use if you presume that the way to use them is to break them apart, line them up, and do arithmetic in something like the way we were taught.   This isn’t to say that the functions of technologies aren’t relevant, but if we decide in advance what their functions must be, we are likely to miss out on what they actually were, and our judgements will be compromised.

To hammer the point home: if we do that, we’re screwed.

Ninilchik Russian in Alaska

There’s an interesting news reports from a couple of weeks ago on the Russian dialect spoken in Ninilchik, Alaska, a community about four hours’ drive southwest of Anchorage.  Founded in 1847 in what was then Russian America (on this map from 1860, it’s near where the X for ‘Fort Georgievsk’ is placed) in an area mostly populated by Dena’ina (Athabaskan) speakers, Ninilchik today is a community of about 900 people, mostly English speaking but with a small remnant of elderly speakers of a Russian dialect that has been developing independently from other Russian varieties for over 100 years.  The Ninilchik Russian website provides quite a bit of information, including several research papers, recordings, and other information.  My only quibble, which is a small one, is that we need to be careful in calling Ninilchik Russian ‘isolated’ – isolated from other forms of Russian, yes, but as a whole, no – obviously it has been in contact with English, with Athabaskan languages, and with Alaskan Eskimo languages over the past century, which is part of the reason it is so interesting.